booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

LOST IN THE MOMENT AND FOUND is an excellent addition to the Wayward Children series, featuring a girl who runs away from a danger lurking in her home and finds herself in a shop for lost thing. It features an exploration of innocence and experience which is full of care, handling distressing topics of abuse and exploitation with a mix of the mundane and the fantastical, ultimately supporting Antsy's agency and ability to make her own choices about her life.

I like the glimpses of other worlds and more information about non-human people of many kinds. Characterization and worldbuilding blends together in a mutually reinforcing way to make it feel like a connected multiverse of portals and random cultural exchange.

This book deals with grooming and gaslighting in a way that I appreciate as someone with similar trauma to Antsy. It makes it very clear how she's in danger and shows how frightening it can be to be gaslit by someone with an indeterminate but significant amount of control over one's life. 

The even numbered books in the Wayward Children series, such as this one, have sometimes been erroneously marketed a standalone books within a larger series. This is to the author's great consternation. They are not stand alone, they are more like the bottle episodes of a TV show. Like a bottle episode, there’s a great deal of backstory, worldbuilding, and sometimes even characters who are explained in the more temporally linear bits of the series, e.g., the odd numbered books. This means that, as a sequel, LOST IN THE MOMENT AND FOUND has characters and a story which in one way is very specific and very self contained. It is about Antsy, why she fled from her home, how she found the shop, how she grew, and what she eventually learns about the price of her time there. It features a fascinating bit of worldbuilding, and does much for the lore in the series, answering questions the reader may or may not have thought to ask, as well as whatever Antsy herself wonders. It does not precisely wrap up anything left hanging from the previous books, but the way it ends implies some very good and interesting things about what the next book in the series might hold. There’s a moment in the middle that briefly places it in time in relation to events previously shown in the series. Emotionally, the ending feels like whatever the comforting equivalent of a cliffhanger is, like the promise of a good surprise.

 I found myself much less interested in the the story than in the first book. I'm still uneasy with some of the character choices I mentioned in the first book's review and I couldn't tell when or if they would be resolved. Ultimately, while I'm unable to pin down exactly what I don't like about this book, trying to make myself finish it resulted in a period of several days where I barely read anything and could only handle re-reads. As soon as I officially DNF'd this I was able to read other stuff again. For me, that's enough. 

*I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book. 

FLIGHT & ANCHOR takes place before the events of FIREBREAK when the operatives are still kids. It is best appreciated after reading FIREBREAK at the very least, as several plot-important events are referenced without quite spoiling them. I was a huge fan of the Boxcar Children series when I was a kid, collecting them for years, owning several dozen by the time I was old enough that I moved on to other stories. FLIGHT & ANCHOR is wonderfully and unabashedly 06 and 22 with their own attempt at being the Boxcar Children. The world of FIREBREAK with its resources controlled by two money-hungry and uncaring corporations literally at war with each other is a very different environment than the setting of that older series, and so this plays out in its own way. If you've never read those books, the salient point is that 06 and 22 run away from a really bad situation, scavenge to try and survive, and end up hiding out in an abandoned boxcar. It's winter, and their initial optimism about their ability to feed themselves turns into dismay at how little money they're able to find and just how much everything costs. They're resourceful, modified to be survivalists and killers, but their conditioning isn't yet complete and sometimes they can remember faint traces of their lives before they were kidnapped by the corporation. The Director is keeping an eye on them, trying to handle this massive screw up without anyone knowing that she's made a mistake. 

The books in this series defy my usual attempts at my sequel check. This gives context for how 06 and 22 end up as the people they are by the time FIREBREAK happens, but it doesn't specifically wrap up anything. The main storyline is both introduced and resolved, but for anyone who's read FIREBREAK the question is much more how it's going to end up the way it always had to, without much doubt as to what the conclusion will be. Even FIREBREAK has that feeling for anyone who has read ARCHIVIST WASP or LATCHKEY. It's not about the destination, it's about the journey, and I could read endless stories of 06 and 22, whatever shape that takes. 

Stopping because Persephone is happy that Hades is paternalistic and sexist, punishing someone because they scared her and she’s a woman. There’s also some ableist language in a way that’s not important to the narrative, and Persephone keeps thinking of some non-human people as “creatures” and “monsters” in a way that feels disparaging. I don’t like this version of Persephone and I don’t like how the story is being told.